Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 818 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#53

Post by revel »

The boring answer is that most "sexy" features don't make that much of a difference. However, a lot of spreadsheet or manually processed data being automated is well over 10x improvement for a customer. Headline features like AI don't make nearly as much of a difference as not having to perform repetitive manual labor.

How much better is it to run a script to extract image file names out of a big csv file and convert them into a different format in a different directory if you were doing that by hand before? 10x? 100x? more?

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#55

Post by sdfhbdf »

bin_bash wrote: post #4

Unlocking my iPhone with a mask on in 14.5

For those not fully versed into Apple stuff:

Parent comment is referring to the new functionality in iOS 14.5 that allows you to use your Apple Watch to unlock your iPhone if it concludes you’re wearing a mask while trying to unlock with Face ID [0]

[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/unlock-iphone-wearing-mask-...

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#56

Post by thesumofall »

iOS pausing music when unplugging headphones. Totally obvious nowadays, but a revolution to me when I experienced it the first time (coming from Nokia). It was one key experience that shifted my perception of my phone as something that needed to be “managed” to do what I wanted to something that supports me throughout the day

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#58

Post by apohn »

jakevoytko wrote: post #17

Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…

Gmail also automatically saved drafts. I can't tell you how many long emails I wrote and lost before hitting the send button with other web email UIs.

Gmail was not just 10x. I think it redefined what a good web based email experience could be. I think it completely changed what people realized and expected the web browser could be from an interactivity standpoint.

Re: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

#59

Post by dale_glass »

SSDs.

Virtualization.

Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before.

LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful.

systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or having to parse logs by hand.

Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible.

sshfs, it's amazingly convenient.

pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievable amount of time fighting with it before.

valgrind. Amazing for debugging memory issues.

Modern hardware. It's only recently that I'm no longer tightly restricted by RAM, disk space or the CPU. I remember the hours spent on freeing up conventional memory, a kernel taking 3 hours to compile, and having room for half the stuff I wanted to install.

Post reply on HN